SCOTUS: Police can stop you for violating nonexistent laws they think are real

SCOTUS: Police can stop you for violating nonexistent laws they think are real
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In a ruling released on Monday for Heien v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court decided with an 8-1 vote that police are justified in stopping citizens for actions they "reasonably" believe are illegal, even if the officers' understanding of the law is significantly or entirely mistaken.

The specific case under consideration concerned a traffic stop over a broken tail light, which led to discovery of drugs in the car. But since North Carolina only requires drivers to have a single "stop lamp," the driver arguably should never have been stopped at all.

In the lone dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, "One is left to wonder why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being seized whenever the law may be susceptible to an interpretative question." The full majority and dissenting opinions are available here.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.